Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

Everyone’s heard the supposed fact that if you take the English
idiom “It’s Greek to me” and search for equivalent idioms in all
the world’s languages to arrive at a consensus as to which
language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey
is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible
language. (For example, the French have the expression ”C’est
du chinois”, “It’s Chinese”, i.e., “It’s incomprehensible”.
Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question
arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an
impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding
phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn
tiānshū yíyàng跟天书一样
meaning “It’s like heavenly script.”